OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is the process of extracting machine printed text from image files. This gives you the ability to search the image file just as you would a text file.

Over the years, OCR has been a big part of paperless office software. Once you scan all of your paper, you want a way to search it quickly and easily.

Since its inception, OCR Software has extended far past basic text extraction from images. Currently, products such as OmniPage 16 can automatically convert a scanned image file to an editable format such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. The accuracy gain that these OCR software products have gained over the years is remarkable. Even more amazing is the formatting gains when converting to a format such as Microsoft Word. In the past, you would have to format and re-format a Word document to get it into the shape needed to actually use it after the OCR process.

You can even capture text from a document that you took a picture with from your digital camera!

The PaperPort 11 product is a great document imaging & scanning application for small office and home office users. With the price of some document imaging & scanning applications getting well into a 5 figure price range, most SOHO users will find that this basic product suits all of their needs at a price tag of around $200. It is a blessing that there is software out there that can help all of us achieve a paperless office and help the environment.